


Don't Let The Good Life Pass You By

by Penknife



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, F/M, Het Sex, Light BDSM, Pre-Dragon Age: Inquisition, Revelations, The Winter Palace (Dragon Age), main character witnesses attempted sexual assault by original character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-09
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2021-01-26 05:23:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21368848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Penknife/pseuds/Penknife
Summary: Thom Rainier's had a lot of practice walking away.
Relationships: Blackwall & Sera, Blackwall/Female Lavellan, Blackwall/OFCs
Comments: 19
Kudos: 32





	Don't Let The Good Life Pass You By

Clarisse is nineteen and pretty as a hothouse rose, with sweet unspoiled manners. She doesn’t have to flaunt her title or her breeding or the manor house that will be a handsome present for her husband when she marries. Everyone somehow knows those things, just as everyone somehow knows that her heavy simple gown cost more than the brighter dresses worn to attract attention to less eligible girls.

Thom can’t speak that language, so he sticks to his own. He tells stories of romantic adventure in the army and leaves out the parts where romantic adventure produces bloody corpses to lie stinking in the sun. He’s a storybook hero fighting monsters to protect the innocent young ladies of Orlais.

“Like yourself,” he says, and bows over her hand, and she blushes when he kisses it.

He can’t dance, but pleading a wound taken in the line of duty wins her sympathetic attendance at his side while more eligible young gentlemen ask her in vain to dance. She listens to his stories with bated breath, and lets him kiss her fingers, and then, more lingeringly, her wrist. Eventually, at yet another ball, she lets him brush a kiss across her pretty lips behind an arbor.

“Tell me I have reason to hope,” he prompts, because spring is coming, and he’ll be ordered out on campaign soon. If he’s not going to lose his chance, he’s going to have to move faster. He suspects she doesn’t have the spirit to stand up to serious opposition from her father, but she’s just the romantic sort who’d adore the idea of a secret marriage—all aboveboard and proper, of course, he knows a Chantry sister with a soft spot for soldiers who’d do the deed—

“You know I adore you,” she says, her face turned up to his, and he feels his heart leap, because all the things he wants seem suddenly in reach.

The knock on the door of his lodgings rousts him out of bed at dawn, unshaven and still in shirt sleeves, with no mask to hide his face. The young man at the door is masked, but the pale curling hair and fox’s chin makes it obvious whose brother he must be.

“Name your seconds, and I will meet you tomorrow at dawn,” the boy says, high color showing in his cheeks below the mask.

“Let’s not be hasty,” Thom says. “Who are you, now?”

“Alcuin de Foret,” the boy says. “I believe you know my sister.”

“I’m courting your sister properly,” Thom says. One kiss isn’t worth spilling blood for, certainly not in Orlais. “There’s no need for you to die in defense of her reputation.”

“I’m concerned with her future,” the boy says. “_Lieutenant _Rainier. A Free Marcher with no family and no patron who will speak for you. And no money, I think, unless living here—“ His tone is dripping with contempt for the rough lodging house where Thom resides “—is a peculiar sort of whim.”

“The lady has property of her own, I understand,” Rainier says.

“I’m sure that will matter to her when her friends drop her and all of polite society whispers about her. Do you think she’ll be happy sitting home on her estate while you’re away? Learning to do needlepoint like a convent sister? Writing letters to friends who don’t answer?”

“Traditionally husbands are some compensation,” Thom answers back, his blood up a bit. It’s not his fault that Orlesian high society thinks anyone who isn’t inbred and landed is one step above gutter trash. Anyhow, with her money and her name, he’ll make them appreciate his better qualities.

“Do you love her?” the boy demands abruptly. He can’t be more than seventeen, practically a child. The idea of him defeating a seasoned soldier in a duel is absurd. Thom could stab him through the heart before he had a chance to show off his fencing-master’s flourishes and leave him to bleed his life away into the dust. And then the lady would inherit his share of the estate as well. Of course it might strain her feelings for him, but if he fell to his knees and pled that he had been forced to it for the love of her—

“How can you even ask?” he says, because that’s the right sort of Orlesian evasion.

“Because I love my sister, and I want her to be happy more than anything else. And if you truly love her the same way, if you’ll devote every moment to making her happy—if you can look me in the eye and tell me that, I’ll talk to our father. I’ll try to make him understand.”

The boy is painfully earnest. All Thom has to say is, “Your sister is my true lady, and I love her more than life.” That’s all he has to say. He can have the girl and the lands and the money and a chance at a place in high society if he’s willing to fight for it. He’s never been one to shrink from a fight.

The only trouble is that of course he doesn’t love her. She’s pretty enough, and it’ll be no hardship to bed her, but he can’t possibly love a pampered little miss like that. They won’t have a thing to say to each other once their romance has come to its storybook conclusion. But that’s the way it’s done by proper gentlemen, isn’t it? Wed her and bed her and back off to the army, and if she finds a lover to pass her idle hours, he won’t necessarily have to know or care.

That’s all he has to say. Or he could murder this spoiled little boy in a duel and probably still get his sister and all her worldly goods. At least he ought to try. If he loses this chance, there won’t be another this season. And next year, who knows if he’ll be on campaign, who knows if they’ll be another pretty titled girl as easy to lead to ruin with flattering words and romantic tales—

He feels abruptly sickened, like he’s starving and trying to fill his belly up with rotten meat. “You’re right,” he says flatly, without any pretense at all. “I’m a fortune-hunter and a cur, and I want your sister for her money and her lands and her name.”

“Then I’ll see you at dawn,” the boy says, lifting his chin. There’s fear in his tone now, though. He’s gotten a good look at Thom, and his own romantic notions are beginning to be replaced by some understanding of what it might feel like to spill his guts out in the dirt.

“There’s no need,” he says. “I won’t see her again. She’s made me no promises, and given me nothing but a kiss at a ball. I’ll write her and end it properly so no one can say she’s to blame. That’s better than a duel and a scandal, isn’t it?” He doesn’t add, “even in Orlais.”

“See that you do, Rainier,” the boy says with a curt nod of dismissal, turning on his heel, and Thom knows the bare name for the insult that it is. He swallows it, and goes back inside to dress and find a letter-writer who’ll put his general sentiments in the right language in a handsome and legible hand.

It’s a pretty letter, to the tune of “The difference in our stations is too great, and I couldn’t bear to spoil the happiness of the most noble lady I know,” quoting some Orlesian play about waking from a dream. He gives it a cursory glance and pays the letter-writer and sends the thing off, and that’s the end of it.

They’ll be more balls, and more young ladies drawn by a fine uniform and a handsome face. If he’s patient, the right opportunity will come along. And then he’ll be rewarded; then he’ll finally get everything he deserves.

*****

“I can’t dance,” Thom tells Minette, when she suggests he take her to a ball in Val Chevin. It’s a different sort of party, not dowagers and young ladies being brought out but young men with their adventurous young wives or poised and dignified mistresses. He won’t be on the hunt for a girl or a promotion, only spending time with her for the joy of it.

In truth he’s in no hurry to find a girl to court. Any eligible young lady would pale beside Minette, with her cascades of dark hair and her sharp dark eyes and her wicked tongue. She’s clever and hard-bitten and probably a terror to her enemies, but she’s gentle with him, except in bed where he prefers to be roughly used.

“Any man who can fence can dance,” Minette says. “You can’t convince me after all this time that you have two left feet.”

She makes it easy to learn, or at least possible to learn, guiding him gravely through the figures until he can believe that he’s not only going through the motions but looks well doing it. He takes her to the ball, and he’s proud to have her on his arm. They look well together, both dark and tall and moving with the same dangerous ease. He attends her with the graces she’s instructed him in, playing handsome knight in attendance on a great lady, and there’s genuine pleasure in the game.

Back in her apartment, they leave the doors flung open to the courtyard as they strip each other hungrily, only the fluttering curtains a sop to modesty. He pays court to her properly on his knees, her thighs spread so that he can use tongue and fingers to good advantage, but that’s a preliminary for them both.

Soon enough he’s face down on the bed so she can take a riding crop to him, sweet hot pain that makes her murmur encouragement when she wins a hiss of indrawn breath from him. His cock is hard and aching, and she hits him harder, and there’s no pretense in her speeding breathing and the shifts of her hips where she straddles his thigh—this is what satisfies her best, to be able to use him hard and selfishly, just as she likes, and at this moment he feels he could worship her for it. He hears her breathless little cry as she reaches a peak, grinding against her own fingers, and braces himself, because once she’s emerged from the shadow of sweet selfish pleasure, she’ll recall that he’s still waiting—

The riding crop comes down in one last stinging, satisfying blaze of pain, hard enough that he’ll surely bear the stripe from it for days, and then she urges him over onto his back so that she can ride him. It can’t last long, as worked up as he already is, but he holds off as long as he can, wanting to hang onto this moment, the shadow of her leaning over him, the soft fall of her hair and the curve of her heavy breasts, her sleek muscled thighs working under his hands—

She stills, and he says “oh, please” handsomely, as he knows she wants, and she grinds down with her hips and he spills himself into her. Every muscle that was tensed has gone loose and easy, and he sprawls in the sheets. She gets up to put the lamp out and comes back to bed to sprawl beside him, just as easily now that she’s worked off her own tension.

Minette doesn’t like to be held tightly in bed, doesn’t like his weight on her; she prefers other means of satisfaction to having him try to please her while he’s inside her. All of this, she’s brought him to understand, is a matter of taste, and where tastes come from isn’t so important, though he knows she has her scars. In some other places there might be rules about what people do in bed, but this is Orlais, and what matters is what suits them both.

This suits him, her ankle hooked over hers affectionately, her fingers twined in his. The warm night air carries some heady fragrance that he can’t name later, and can’t ever quite forget.

Another night, and he’s brought her dinner for them to share, bread and cheese and sweet pastries that all apparently have their proper names and stories, a bottle of what she’s taught him is acceptable wine despite a price he can afford, sweet dried figs from a market stall. They make a picnic of it on her bed, and then finish off the bottle while she reads to him from a book of plays, something he would once have thought he could never enjoy.

He’s beginning to understand theater, though, the passions of men and women long dead captured like painted shadows. She spends a good deal of the money he gives her on books, and passes them around among her friends, the educated and well-spoken mistresses of younger sons of noble houses and military men. Thom had a bit of schooling as a kid, he knows well enough how to read and write and figure, but he’s coming to understand just how much there is to learn, and how much bigger the world is than he imagined. It’s a mark of Minette’s tact that she can make those lessons sweet, not stinging.

He’ll need to know these things when he goes up in the world. He’s a captain, now, he’s gotten that far on his talent, but he’s beginning to understand that to reach higher, he needs connections. He needs a noble patron who’ll give him a commission or make him a chevalier, something to get him over that next step. And of course the easiest way to get one is still to marry. What he has to sell is his handsome face and the pretty ways she’s taught him. There’s no other currency for what he wants to buy.

It ends when the Blight breaks out and his regiment is transferred to guard the border with Ferelden.

“Must you go?” she asks, and she knows he must, but there are other questions in her voice, questions she’ll never ask. He loves her for her stubborn pride.

If he asked her to marry her at this moment, marry her and come with him, he thinks she’d do it. He thinks if he asked her to come with him without a ring, she might do that as well. There are plenty of men in Orlais who have a wife and a mistress both. He thinks she might understand.

And yet—it’s one thing to court young ladies at balls while having a mistress in town. It’s another thing to live with her, and he’d have to, on campaign. It would be one more mark against him, and he’s barely palatable to young ladies as it is. And to marry Minette, to keep her in a few stinking rooms to raise his brats while she grieves for her freedom until she wishes they’d never been born, to quarrel until he raises his fists to her and she wishes she’d never seen his face—

Keeping her and making a prize of a marriage both is the dream, and that wretched house is the nightmare, and this is the reality; he bends gravely over her hand and kisses it as if she were the finest lady in Orlais, and it’s true that there’s no finer.

“Maybe I’ll see you again,” he says, although he knows that once he goes, she’ll have to find another friend to pay her rent and keep her in books and tasteful gowns and good Orlesian wine. He doesn’t begrudge her a bit of it. He hopes that she’ll be happy.

He regrets it the first night in the new camp, sleeping cold and alone, but it’s years before he understands the full value of what he threw away.

*****

Her name is Emilie, or Annette, or Claudine; he’s aware that he wouldn’t have forgotten if he had actually cared to remember. She’s smiling brightly up at him, but the expression doesn’t touch her eyes beneath her mask. 

“And where do you live, Captain Rainier?” she asks. “When you’re not required to lead your men on some bold campaign?”

The question is a little too brittle, as if she already knows the answer.

“I’m afraid I’ve never had the opportunity to make a home for myself,” he says. No lands, no money to speak of; that’s what that means. “But perhaps there’s a home you’d hate to leave yourself.”

“The manor belongs to my half-brother since my father passed away, but of course there is a charming lodge,” she says. “I adore rustic living. It is so quaint.” 

There’s hurt in every word. He knows Orlais well enough to work out the drama from these few lines. The daughter of a young second wife, pampered by an elderly father, but with a much older brother who’d waited too long already for his inheritance and didn’t care to share. And now Papa is dead, and mademoiselle has come down in the world to the point that she’s considering him.

“I’m sure it’s charming indeed,” he says. It’s probably twice the size of the house where Thom grew up and furnished with every comfort. She can look out the window and see the manor house, a reminder of everything she feels she deserves and that she now lacks.

It still wouldn’t be a bad bargain. If she doesn’t have lands or wealth, she still has her name, and her desperate desire to arrest her social fall will make her his unceasing champion in public. And if she resents him in private, is that really more than he can expect?

He used to expect more. Maybe not a storybook princess, but a girl besotted with him, who he might feel some remorse for using and hurting. At thirty, whatever he lacked, he had a handsome face and a promising career and the knack of using both to charm young ladies to his side.

At nearly forty, they look at him and think him old. Not a young captain but an aging one, with only a few more years to somehow make his mark before he’s lost the chance forever. There are furrows now at the corners of his eyes and fine scars down the backs of his roughened hands. The young ladies who still linger at his side aren’t looking for a storybook hero.

They’re looking for someone to settle for, someone who might settle for them. They’re plain or penniless or marked by some scandal. They have no use for men in bed and not enough courage to insist on keeping a lady friend instead, or they’ve borne a child too soon and had it sent away. They’re bright and talkative and desperate and bitter.

It’s the bitterness that he’s not sure he can swallow. He’s bedded plain girls and been as satisfied as if he’d spent the night with a great beauty. He’d settle himself for a name without lands or wealth. He’d look the other way at a “poor young relation” to be supported at his expense. He’d be willing to make an honest bargain with someone who’d be happy with her share of it.

But to be looked at like this every day across the breakfast table, as living proof of how far the lady has fallen—how long would it take before envy got its claws in him just as deep, and he blamed her for every door her name wouldn’t open? There’s more than one kind of house where misery lives, and he’s learned by now that poor women aren’t the only ones who go masked to hide their bruises.

He’s aware abruptly that he’s missed more than one beat in the dance of words, and that her expression is already souring over her fan. “I suppose you have a great many people you want to talk to,” she says, and he knows what he should say is, “but none as charming as you.”

“I won’t keep you,” he says, and she turns her shoulder to him. The party is very loud and very crowded and he’s drunk more than he likes to. It’s making the ballroom, if not spin, at least shimmer, like a mirage over hot sand. He leans against the wall to clear his head, waiting for it to all once again seem real.

*****

Jeanette runs a tavern outside of Verchiel, on a road that they're ordered back and forth along every few months as long as they're stationed in the Dales. It's a comfortable spot for a hot dinner and a warm fire, and there's a clean room for the company's captain. It's their third time or the fourth that Jeanette makes it clear she'd be happy to join him there, not as a mercenary transaction but simply because she's a woman who likes men and likes him, and she's got no more desire than he does to lie alone.

The first time, he sticks to thrusting between her thighs, her breasts a warm sweet weight in his hands. When they've both worn themselves out satisfactorily and are lying sprawled sweaty and sated, the bedclothes thrown off and the fire banked low, she says, "Next time you needn't scruple so much. I know the uses of witherstalk, and besides I’m not a young girl terrified to get with child."

It's true that she must be near his own age, though not so old, he thinks, that getting with child is out of the question. "It's not easy for a woman alone."

"I've got my father still, and though I don't let him stay up nights tending bar anymore, it wouldn't strain his old bones to hold a baby. And I have friends, and the hired girl. I've made sure my two boys don't feel the lack of a father." There's a sharp note in her voice that discourages him from saying that a growing boy might want a father no matter how good his mother. He knows well enough that there are men whose children are better off without them.

He leaves her with a kiss and a rueful smile in the morning, but he's back again in three weeks, and again a month after that. The next time, they're encamped nearby, but he makes the hour’s ride to spend the night anyway. It's easy to begin counting on coming back every so often to sit with a warm plate and his boots drying by the fire, and Jeanette pleased to see him and ready to be pleased.

He thinks there are other attractions to having him about. A few times when someone's drunk too much and is spoiling for a fight, Thom shows them out. Even out of his armor, most people he shows out take a look at his broad shoulders and his sword and his bearing, and they go. That's nothing for a big man, when it’s a dangerous undertaking for a woman with a seven-year-old all too ready to defend her with his fists and a four-year-old still hanging on her skirts.

They're good boys. Gaston is eager for stories of war, and Thom tells him a few carefully chosen ones, not about dreams of glory or the hard truths of filth and blood, but about sticking by your friends and facing up to the monsters that spring out of the dark. The boy's old enough to know that monsters exist, and old enough to hear that they can be killed.

Thom brings them both toy horses bought on a whim at a fair, and little Michel carries his like a puppy while Gaston tells himself some long story about a hero on a fine charger. He's a clever child, soaking up stories and telling them back word-perfect. Maybe he'd be a bard, if he had more chance of schooling than he'll get in this tavern and this town.

"The boys like you," Jeanette says, lying propped up on the pillows with the blankets tucked round both their knees against the winter's chill. "You're good with children."

He shrugs. "I had a sister back home." Back in Markham, in a little room not so different from this one, lying in his bed on the other side of the room, talking to Liddy so he wouldn't hear his father's raised voice or the sound of a slap and his mother crying. Then Liddy gone, and the heavier dark—

"I wouldn't mind seeing you about the place more," Jeanette says. "I keep a good house, and it makes a fair living."

"I know you do," he says, and kisses her fingers. She does an honest day's work and makes an honest living, which is more than can be said for most Orlesian ladies.

"Well?" She smiles up at him, and he knows what she wants him to say. "There’s many a soldier who'd be glad of such a soft spot to come to rest when they're done adventuring."

He knows there is. It's a fine fair offer, and if it means accepting that he's failed at all his hopes and dreams, he'd have her for consolation, and a warm comfortable tavern isn't the worst sort of prison.

He's never felt it a prison before. It's been easy, taking her to bed, watching the children play in front of the fire, as long as he could light and go as free as a bird. But the idea of the walls closing in around him, married and bound, like going back to that house in Markham where he swore he'd never set his foot again—_maybe I'll end in the gutter_, _but at least I won't be you_—

He's fought all his life to climb farther than that. If he hasn't scaled the heights, he still can't bring himself to just let go and fall. And there's a new campaign coming in the spring, and Chapuis promises there's a chance for real distinction, to be promoted and named chevalier if he gives satisfaction. He'll throw the dice one more time at least. One more time before he lets the walls close in around him.

"I'm sure there's none better," he says.

"You mean you want better," she says, and tugs at him to make him face her in the lamplight. "Better than this. Better than me."

"I'm a military man," he says. "You knew that when we met."

"I thought you were better," she says, and he turns his face away.

*****

Thom doesn’t care what the barmaid’s name might be, only that she keeps the drinks coming. It’s been a while since he worked, but he’s got enough coin still in his purse to get drunk. He’s made a good start of it so far. He puts another coin on the table and she sets down another cup without giving him a second glance.

His clothes don’t invite one. He can’t remember now where he sold his coat, or when he traded his good boots for thinner ones that leak when it rains. He’s kept the sword, his only means of making his way, but the armor he had to leave behind. He’s scraped together enough to buy cheap leather in its place.

And now he’s holed up in a piss-poor tavern on a back road where he can drink his way through his money before he hires himself out as a sellsword again. That’s the measure of his worth, these days, a big man who’s quick with his fists and brutal in a fight. It’s what he has left to sell, and there’s always someone who wants to buy. 

There are better and bigger houses a little way down the road. This one attracts mostly the local militia, full of themselves in new home-sewn uniforms, and a few travelers who don’t know better than to stop here. There’s a merchant getting so drunk he’ll likely be robbed before morning, a few threadbare kids who might be the ones to do it, and a man in the worn gray and blue of a Warden, a rare enough sight in these parts that it’s probably attracting all the attention from him.

Anyway, he’s drunk enough tonight to stop looking over his shoulder. There are few enough people who’ll look for Thom Rainier in a washed-up mercenary down on his luck, unshaven and unwashed. And if anyone knows him and names him, at least that’s an ending, of a sort. He’s considered the other kind, the kind he could make with a knife or a noose in some lonely barn, and knows he’s too much of a coward for it.

There’s a scuffle and a cry, and his head comes up.

“Just being friendly,” a man is telling the barmaid, some roughshod militiaman at a table with his friends. They’re drunk and loud and full of themselves, like they think the uniform gives them bigger balls.

She straightens her skirts. “Mind you keep your hands to yourself.”

“You could stand to make some friends,” one of the other says, and reaches up to pinch her breast. She slaps him, and his companions laugh.

“The cat has claws,” one of them says. “Better watch she doesn’t scratch your eyes out.” He stands and gets the barmaid from behind by the wrists.

“You’ve had your fun,” she says, twisting in the man’s grip but still trying to make it a game.

“Not yet,” the first man says, and puts his hand up her skirt.

Thom pushes back his chair and stands. “The lady said, keep your hands to yourselves.”

“I don’t see any ladies here,” one of the militiamen says.

“Do you see me asking you to be polite?”

The man spits on the tavern floor. He’s probably thinking that there’s four of his friends and one of Thom. “Sod off, unless you want a lesson in manners,” the man says, and draws his sword.

Thom could kill all four without breaking a sweat, but he doesn’t want blood on the tavern floor. That makes the fight harder. He blocks their attempts to cut his throat with blunt efficiency, and waits for the moments when they let temper get the better of them.

Two of them he disarms, leaving them sputtering and impotent without a length of steel to thrust at what they want to fight. One he sends sprawling, and then kicks in the head to keep him down. The last he gets up against the wall, his own blade leveled at the man’s throat.

“Apologize to the lady,” he says.

“My apologies,” the man mutters.

“And then get out.”

“This place is a shithole anyway,” one of the others says. They make their retreat, swearing and grumbling all the way, and Thom bows his head to the barmaid.

“I trust they won’t trouble you again.”

“They’re all talk,” she says, but there’s something in her face that might be gratitude, and he’s not sure what to do with that, or the little spark of satisfaction that it kindles, so he merely collects his things and heads for the door. Best to put some distance between himself and this place before anyone thinks of coming back with the law.

He gets as far as an old barn closed with a simple latch, and lets himself in to spend the night. When the door creaks open again, he’s preparing to explain himself to a farmer with pitchfork in hand.

Instead it’s the Warden, a big man with gray threading his dark hair and a considering expression that rakes right through him. “Do you suppose there’s room for another traveler to bed down for the night? It’s going to rain.”

“I don’t own the place,” Thom says. The Warden unshoulders his pack and makes himself comfortable on a hay bale without further conversation. He settles in to watch Thom, which is unnerving. “What’s your problem?” Thom asks finally.

The man shrugs. “How much do you know about the Grey Wardens?” Outside there’s the first rattling of rain against the roof.

“You fight darkspawn.” He met a few Wardens during the Blight and the years after.

“We protect the innocent. And we can always use good men.”

“I don’t see any good men here,” Thom says.

“Whatever you’ve done, you can be better,” the man says, but it’s a while before Thom understands what he means, and longer before he begins to believe him.

He still only half believes on the night when he mutters his confession to Blackwall, fast and bleak. Murder and worse. He’s ended in the gutter after all.

“I deserve to hang,” he says. “And instead I ran like a dog.”

“I’m going to tell you something you shouldn’t be told yet,” Blackwall says. “If you join the Wardens, you will die in that service. There are different ways. Fast, in battle, or slow. Some of us die slow.” He grows silent for a moment, frowning into the distance as if he’s listening to some sound that Thom can’t hear, and then shakes his head to dismiss it. “They aren’t pretty deaths.”

“Few are.”

“But we’ll take your life, and your death, and use them to protect the innocent. You did a terrible thing. This is a chance to make up for it. To be a better man.”

“I wish I’d never done it,” he chokes out, and for the first time, he means not _I made a mistake and ruined my life_ but _all I want is for them somehow to still be alive_.

“That’s a start,” Blackwall says, and puts a hand on his shoulder.

He’s started to hope by the time it ends, on a cold hillside littered with darkspawn corpses. He has the vial of darkspawn blood, just like he was told. But Blackwall is dead, and with him, his chance for Thom Rainier to be a better man.

Because what is he supposed to say now? I’m a murderer, but I didn’t kill Warden Blackwall? I’m Thom Rainier, but Blackwall told me I could be better than that? Make me a Warden and give me your trust, when I’ve betrayed everyone who ever trusted me?

He sits for a while beside the cold body. If he could have been the one to die tonight he would have. It would have been an ending. All he wants right now is to somehow bring Blackwall back to life.

And Warden Blackwall buries Thom Rainier on that cold and desolate hillside, and it’s Warden Blackwall who walks away.

*****

Blackwall likes the Inquisitor, which wasn’t something he expected. Of course he respects Lavellan. That’s proper for a Grey Warden. She’s decisive and determined, not a starry-eyed idealist but a seasoned and sensible woman shouldering an impossible burden. The common folk worship her, after the retreat from Haven, and she’s won the soldiers’ respect.

But he also likes her. Elleth has a dry sense of humor and a way of cutting through the crap when people have started floating ideas that obviously can’t work just to hear themselves talk. She doesn’t complain about camping on rough ground, unlike some useless pampered mages he could mention, and she pitches in to set up and take down camp like a woman who’s used to doing things for herself.

He insists on carrying firewood rather than letting her do it. “Being my lady Inquisitor has to have some privileges,” he says, stacking the driest logs he could find by the fire.

“That’s still strange,” she says, sitting on a log with one foot crossed over her knee fletching an arrow with swift sure hands. “I’m more used to ‘hey, you.’”

He expects she’s used to worse than that, as an elf traveling in human lands. He’s met the Dalish, a few times, in the back country of Ferelden. They were suspicious, but not hostile. He thinks she’s curious, but not suspicious. Probably because he’s a Grey Warden, and therefore clearly worthy of trust.

“How about, ‘hey, Inquisitor,’” Varric offers cheerfully.

“That works for me,” Elleth says. She protests the title, but he thinks she secretly likes it. It’s respect, and that’s not so easy to come by for an elf among humans. But what she’s doing to earn respect and a title is saving the world, not shedding innocent blood or stealing a dead man’s name.

He looks up to see her watching him, with an expression that suggests that even under the heavy beard and the thick padding of his armor she sees something she likes. He doesn’t turn heads anymore, but he takes a secret satisfaction in being watched, and in watching her, when he can do it without being too forward. She’s no younger than he is, but he likes her lean grace and her swagger and the quick smile that transforms her face. She’s handsome in her armor, and he wouldn’t mind helping her out of it.

He’ll do no such thing, of course. Warden Blackwall has nothing to offer a woman beyond an occasional night with a fellow traveler on the road. And midnight talk with a bedmate, sleepy and unguarded, would be the fastest way to be found out.

He’s beginning to want very badly not to be found out yet. He steers well clear of Leliana, although so far she seems willing to accept him at his word even though she’s known Wardens before, which he takes as a sign that he’s doing something right. He avoids Cole, too, because the last thing he wants is for an actual spirit to see into his actual head.

He intends to keep entirely to himself, but the horses in the stable aren’t much for talking, and it’s easy to drift down to the Herald’s Rest where there’s always a crowd. He takes to Sera at once despite knowing that a Warden would probably disapprove of every word that comes out of her cheerfully filthy mouth. She hasn’t got a single pretension, or any ambition higher than “help people,” and he’s beginning to think there’s actually no ambition higher.

He turns Elleth down the first time she makes her interest clear, and then, more regretfully, a second time, and the third time he decides it’s worth the risk to him. And there’s little enough risk to her, he tells himself. She’s looking for a diversion from her problems and a comfort when it’s all too much, and someone to talk to who sees her as a friend and a woman, not a holy symbol. This isn’t love.

It’s sex, and if the sex is good—pinned down under her weight on the stable floor with her riding him, his breeches down and hay prickling in places it shouldn’t, both of them trying to stay quiet with only moderate success, a breath of laughter muffled against her fingers—it still doesn’t mean it’s love.

But it’s friendship, and that’s more than he intended. He shouldn’t get too attached to these people, this place. He’s only here until they find him out. That’s as long as he gets to stay.

*****

Elleth wants him to go with her to Halamshiral, and this is obviously a terrible idea. He tries to tell her so without explaining why, and she tells him we all have to do things we don’t like, and that he’d better go get fitted for a dress uniform if he wants it to have room for his privates.

Walking into the Winter Palace in uniform he feels like he’s seeing double. Warden Blackwall is keeping a sharp eye out for assassins, and irritated at the rasp of the new wool against the back of his neck, and unimpressed by the finery around him. Thom Rainier is walking among the men and women he desperately wanted to respect him and wondering when one of them will name him for a murderer and a betrayer.

“Don’t you agree, Blackwall?” Elleth says, in a tone that suggests it isn’t the first time she’s spoken, and Blackwall collects himself.

“Yes, my lady,” he says.

He manages to be no one but Blackwall until they’re striding down the length of the ballroom floor toward Celene, being presented to the Orlesian Empress as heroes of the realm. All eyes are on Warden Blackwall as his distinctions and decorations are announced. At the top of the stairs, Celene waits, crystalline and lovely and cold.

This is everything Thom Rainier ever wanted, and every bit of it is stolen. He makes his bow and steps back to let Elleth speak to Celene. It’s probably the first time an elf’s ever addressed the Orlesian court in public. Not all of the murmurs are polite, but they can’t ignore her. They’ll never ignore her.

The rest of the evening is worse. Masked nobles eat little cakes and call the Inquisitor ‘knife-ear’ and ‘rabbit’ and worse when they think she can’t hear, and Blackwall attempts to point out why this isn’t polite without actually starting a fistfight at an Orlesian ball. He runs into one person who attempts drunkenly to insist that they’ve seen him on the tournament circuit, and he protests doggedly that Warden Blackwall has never fought a tournament in Orlais. After that, he stays in the shadows until the night’s action heats up.

They find dead men in the garden and the newest sorry sod of a mercenary captain to swallow Gaspard’s lies. They fight their way back to the ballroom, and enter with blood still on their hands, scattering party guests before them.

There’s a moment when Elleth could save Celene, which Blackwall thought they intended to do, and instead she stands frozen in place. There are still parts of the city where charred timbers recall the fires Celene set to gut the alienage. He’s not sure if Elleth is thinking of that, or of the way Celene looks through Briala like she’s no one of consequence, or if it’s merely that she’s far out of her depth tonight, and for once she isn’t sure.

Florianne cuts Celene’s throat, and then their job is simpler. Florianne is a nightmare, somehow everywhere at once, and he puts himself between her and Elleth again and again. Dorian lights up the garden with fire to drive Florianne out from cover, unquestionably a brave man if not at this point in the evening an entirely sober one. It’s up to Cassandra to bring her to ground and force her into a final duel, both of them fighting like the prettiest of fencing-masters. Finally Florianne spills out her blood on the ground, and Elleth walks back into the party and hands Briala the incriminating material she’ll need to get Gaspard onto a leash, and they’ve changed history, somehow.

He finds Elleth out on the balcony and comes to her side without a word.

She leans a little against his shoulder. “Do you suppose they’d miss us if we found a tavern and got very drunk?”

He knows some good ones, and wouldn’t show his face in any of them for any price. “I think Josephine would send out a search party.”

“I think you’re right.” She’s looking out over the city, the bright lights of the garden and the darker rooftops beyond. “I totally failed, didn’t I? I did everything wrong.” Her face is drawn in the lamplight.

“Gaspard’s no prize,” he says. “But neither was Celene.”

“And Florianne was working for Corypheus.”

“So you had your pick of a bad lot. At least Briala has the bastard on a leash. He’ll have to have some manners when he speaks to you now.”

“If he knows what’s good for him,” she says, and then, “Tell me you haven’t been defending my honor all night.”

“Just having a word with a few people.”

“I didn’t expect anything else,” she says. “They were never going to look at me and see anything other than an elf.”

“They see the Inquisitor. And you’re worth more than any of them,” he says.

He thinks she’s pleased by that, although all she says is, “That’s not hard.” She gazes out over the balcony for a while longer, and then says, “Did you see the boy carrying drinks, out there? He came up to me, and he offered me the tray, and then he said, ‘you avenged them.’ And he looked at me like …”

Like he worshipped her, with her weathered vallaslin and her straight back and the uniform that says that tonight the world turns on her word. “Like what you did mattered,” he says, and somehow it does.

Somehow they’ve changed the world tonight, maybe for the better, but anyway a change. And if they can do that, then that’s what matters, not courting the favor of those costumed peacocks inside the palace. He’s abruptly unsure why he ever believed that was what mattered at all. He isn’t sure he understands Thom Rainier anymore, and he’s sure he doesn’t like him.

“I think you promised me a dance,” Elleth says, and he offers her his arm, grave and proper. He isn’t certain who he is as he turns her around the balcony, her waist warm against his arm, Rainier or Blackwall or Rainier pretending to be Blackwall. He’s not sure if Wardens dance. And he wants to dance with the woman he loves, and at the same time he wants to be Warden Blackwall so that he can possibly deserve her; he wants there to be some way he can deserve all the things he’s begun to wish that he could keep.

Back in Skyhold, Sera scoffs at the story of the ball at the Winter Palace.

“Well, we’re well shut of Celene, but Gaspard’s no better,” she says, and he can’t argue with that. “One more butt to polish the throne, and a new set of boots in everyone’s face. Don’t tell me our Inquisitor sucked up to that.”

“More like gave him good reason to fear her wrath,” he says.

“Good. Josephine was all blah, blah, the Game, blah, blah, respect, and who’d want to be respected by a bunch of human pricks in silly clothes?”

“I’m not sure why any man would,” Blackwall says. There are times lately when he hates Thom Rainier enough to want to bury him again.

“Oh, I know that one,” Sera says. “They want to be important people because they think that way nobody can hurt them. But you know what makes people not hurt you? It’s knives.” She considers for a moment. “Or arrows. Arrows work, too.”

“You have a point,” he says, and while he’s not sure he entirely agrees, it’s definitely food for thought.

“I guess we’re going to have to find those other Wardens now,” Sera says. “The ones who disappeared.” She looks up at him, and for a moment she is not an entirely confident woman of the world. “You aren’t planning on going anywhere, are you?”

Warden Blackwall doesn’t have a single reason to leave. Maybe that’s the only answer he needs.

“Not any time soon,” he says, and wonders if there’s any way to make that true.

*****

Blackwall takes up woodcarving to fill the empty hours. He doesn’t actually have as many to fill anymore. He helps Cullen train the new recruits, once Cullen learns he’s more patient than Cassandra is with green troops who don’t know one end of a sword from the other. He helps Dennet look after the horses as well; he’s always liked the beasts, and Elleth has little interest in the mounts that people keep sending her. He spends evenings nursing a pint in the tavern or in his lady’s bed.

But there are still times when the stable fills up with silence, and he’s never been a man to pass the hours with his nose in a book. There’s scrap wood enough to work with. He’s not sure at first that he’ll still have the knack of it after so long, but the knife bites easily into the grain, a little sharp-eared nug taking shape under his hands. It’ll make some child down in the camp smile.

Thom Rainier wouldn’t have done this. He would have been too proud for anyone to see him working with his hands. He would have flinched from the memory of his father’s hands over his, patient for once, showing him how to turn the knife. Blackwall finds that neither one troubles him over much.

He’s getting used to being Blackwall. In the field, he’s an impenetrable wall between Elleth and all the monsters that want to tear her apart. In Skyhold, people turn to him with questions and listen when he talks. In the camp, Blackwall hands a wooden toy to a child who takes it trustingly, and her mother says, “Say thank you to the Warden.”

He wants to keep on being this man, with an ache in his chest that never entirely goes away. It’s after Adamant that he begins to wonder if he ever actually has to stop. The remaining Wardens keep to themselves, as desperate as he is to prove that they’re more than murderers. They won’t come around to ask probing questions, none of them wanting to face a Warden who isn’t stained by the same blood. And the man he buried sleeps sound in his hillside grave.

He’d outlive that man he’s supposed to be eventually, in the natural course of things, but it seems unlikely that any of them will live out the fight against Corypheus. The knowledge makes every moment he can stay seem precious.

And more than that—he never meant to make friends here, men and women who he knows don’t trust easily, and revealing the lie will make them colder to the next man who calls himself their friend. He never meant for Elleth to fall in love with him, but he knows she is in love with the man she thinks he is. Telling her now that she’s fallen in love with a lie would leave her bleeding.

“The Inquisitor’s looking for you,” Sera says, her feet up in the inn. She makes kissy noises and then makes a face. “Also we got broadsheets from Val Royeaux. There’s a whole song about the Wardens, but it’s pretty grim. Maryden’s practicing it already.”

“I’m sure that’ll cheer everyone up,” Blackwall says.

“Why do they send this stuff?” Sera asks, rifling through handbills and broadsheet ballads. “Nobody cares about some poor sod who’s going to hang for knocking off some nobleman and his kiddies, or about who got eaten by a dragon in Orlais. Think it might eat Gaspard?”

He extracts the handbill from her hand without protest. He doesn’t think his expression changes while he reads it. “I’ll take this one,” he says.

“You’re off in a hurry. Better not keep her waiting, though, she’ll start without you, right?” Sera says.

“Better not,” he says, and turns his back so that he can leave her exactly like that, with her feet propped up on the table, scribbling in naughty words in the margins of some soppy ballad. Anything else wouldn’t be right.

He has to be sure, so he searches through Leliana’s reports while she’s down at supper. Half a dozen people can see him doing it, but no one questions why he’s there. If Blackwall is going through Leliana’s papers, he must have a good reason for it.

He finds the report, and he sits reading it for the hundredth time in the stable, and he wants to be Blackwall so that it won’t have anything to do with him. He takes down a hooded lantern and uncovers the flame. He could burn the page and watch it curl away to ashes. He could climb the stairs to where his lady waits and sleep warm and untroubled in her bed.

Thom Rainier could have done those things. Warden Blackwall would never let a man hang for his crimes. And if that’s the choice, he’d rather die as Blackwall than live as Thom Rainier.

He wonders if this is what the Calling is like for the Wardens, the sudden knowledge that you’re a dead man walking. It’s a bruised and painful ache for everything he’s come to love, even this shabby stable and everything in it he’s ever touched.

He means to tell her, when she comes to find him. There’s no sense in waiting. But he can’t, and he can’t, and he can’t. The right words won’t form on his lips.

And then they’re back tangled in the stable loft, her mouth warm under his own, and he wants this to be the way he remembers her. Still in love with the man she believes she knows. Not furious and demanding that he stay. Not tempting either of them with an escape from the reckoning that’s due.

He cups his hand over her golden hair and feels it warm in his hand. Thom Rainier would stay. Thom Rainier has never wanted anything more than he’s wanted this.

Blackwall hasn’t, either, but Blackwall has the strength to walk away.

*****

Elleth has Thom Rainier brought back from Val Royeaux in chains, when he wants her to leave him there to be hanged. It’s the only ending a murderer and traitor like him deserves.

He knows when he’s finally brought to face her that she knows it, too. There’s a price for what he’s done, and he ought to pay it. Her voice is iron as she says, “Your life belongs to me.”

She may still give him an end, but not the one he craved. He’s watched her behead the condemned without flinching, and this isn’t the way he wanted to die, bending his neck to the woman he loves. She might at least have left him to the hangman’s rope.

Instead, she says, “You have your freedom,” and it feels like the gallows trapdoor opening up, leaving him to dangle and kick over empty space.

“It can’t be that easy.”

“It isn’t. You’re free to atone as the man you are, not the traitor you thought you were or the Warden you pretended to be.”

He isn’t Blackwall, and he isn’t Thom Rainier, but he’s still standing here, with the shackles cold on his wrists and his heart still beating. He doesn’t know if she’ll let him stay, but he knows that if she’ll let him, this is the only place he wants to be.

And they meet on the stairs, and he turns his face up to her, and she kisses him with his hands still bound, claiming him. Whatever man he is, she wants him, and that shakes him to the bone.

It’s not an ending. She’s furious still, and he’ll have to make amends for the things he can atone for: for the lies, and for leaving without a word. He knows it won’t ever be possible to atone for the rest. It’s harder to live as the man who did those things than to swing at the end of a rope. It’s harder to face everyone he’s betrayed as Thom Rainier than it was to walk away.

“So you’re a great big liar,” Sera says when he finally steels himself to set foot in the tavern. “And you confessed. Who does that? You never _confess_.”

“I was trying to save a man from being hanged,” he points out.

“We could have done that. I know people.”

“That wouldn’t have been right.”

“Maybe cut out telling other people not to be awful, if you’re awful?” she says, but she nudges his chair over in his direction with her foot, and at least she’s speaking to him. Some aren’t, and maybe won’t ever be. And Elleth is angry, and hurt, and reasonably enough suspicious now of his intentions, though he hopes not beyond repairing. He’ll have to mend what he can, and let be the things that are broken beyond repair.

“I know that it matters to try,” he says, because he means to try.

However hard that may be, he finds himself not tempted for a moment to walk away. And maybe that’s merely the habit of being Blackwall, but maybe there’s something not entirely worthless anymore about Thom Rainier.

If this isn’t the ending he deserves, it’s the beginning that he gets, and he intends to make the most of it he can; he’s learned better at last than to let his best chances pass him by.


End file.
